San Diego’s Mozart Festival Is Moving Downtown

The annual Mainly Mozart Festival, which spent its first two years in the Old Globe’s Lowell Davies Festival Theatre in Balboa Park, will move downtown to the historic Spreckels Theatre this season.

Festival music director David Atherton announced Wednesday that the 11-day music festival, which runs from May 30 to June 9, has left its outdoor venue which seats 600 for the quieter and acoustically preferable 1,400-seat Spreckels Theatre.

The move to the larger venue will allow ticket prices to be lowered from a flat $30 at the Old Globe to $18 to $30 for evening performances at the Spreckels and $10 to $18 for matinees.

Overhead air traffic and noises from the adjacent San Diego Zoo compromised the festival orchestra’s outdoor performances in Balboa Park, although many patrons liked the park setting. During the 1989 festival, Atherton and his board had already begun negotiations for a different venue that would both bring the 30-piece festival orchestra indoors and give the festival more flexibility in scheduling.

Some members of the festival orchestra had said they were willing to return to the festival in 1990 only if Atherton moved it into a more acoustically suitable location.

Atherton, the British conductor who served as the San Diego Symphony’s music director from 1981-1987, described the Spreckels Theatre as “a concert setting that provides an acoustic which is arguably the finest in Southern California. The pure sound is amazing. I recall a performance with the San Diego Symphony we did in 1983, the sound of the orchestra in the room was incredible for its clarity and resonance.”

Although the theater on Broadway and 1st Ave., which also once was a movie palace, has been little used over the last decade, in recent seasons a San Diego-sponsored dance series and last year a series of pop concerts have been presented at the Spreckels.

This year’s nine-concert festival, which has a budget of $380,000, will open with a semi-staged performance of Mozart’s “The Impresario,” a one-act comic opera in an English-language adaptation by New Yorker music critic Andrew Porter. Porter will narrate the opera, which will feature San Diego Opera general director Ian Campbell in the role of the impresario.

The opera cast will also include sopranos Candace Goetz, Pamela Menas and tenor Kevin Anderson. “Amadeus,” the 1984 Milos Forman film on the life of Mozart, will also be screened June 3 as part of the festival.

This year’s soloists include classical guitarist Pepe Romero, pianist Gregory Allen, cellist Ronald Thomas, and violist Cynthia Phelps. Violinist William Preucil will return as the festival’s concertmaster, and British clarinetist Michael Collins will perform Mozart’s mature works for clarinet, including the Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, and the Clarinet Quintet, K. 581. Dennis James will play the rarely-heard 18th-Century instrument, the glass armonica, in Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo, K. 617.

Programming innovations this season include a masked ball held at the nearby Kingston Hotel on June 1, and two lighter Sunday matinee concerts. San Diego musicians Frank Almond, violin, and Felix Fan, cello, will play on the June 2 matinee program, and a number of local celebrities will assist in a performance of Leopold Mozart’s “Toy Symphony” on the June 9 family matinee concert.

Preconcert lecturers will be given by Porter, who will speak on “Mozart and the Modern Stage,” James, who will discuss the glass harmonica, and Bette Cox of the Black Experience as Expressed in Music Foundation, who will discuss the music of Joseph Boulogne de Saint-Georges. The festival’s final program will include Saint-Georges’ Overture, “L’Amant Anonyme” and the Beethoven Triple Concerto.